What Do Effective Marketing Strategies for Restaurants Look Like During COVID-19?

With parts of America beginning to reopen despite the lingering COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants are searching for ways to drum up business and recoup their losses. 


To achieve this, along with undergoing a major shift in digital transformation, the next best avenue for success lies in effective marketing strategies to regain customer loyalty. After all, many customers are skeptical about the safety of dining out with COVID-19 as a potential threat. However, if restaurant owners can implement the right approach, rebuilding the business and winning customers back is entirely possible. 
To help give you an idea of what needs to happen, here’s what effective marketing strategies for restaurants look like during COVID-19: 

Get Active on Social Media

All effective marketing strategies for restaurants should include social media, but now more than ever, get active on a variety of platforms to connect with customers and share your story. 
For example, using Instagram, you should be posting photos of what changes or updates your restaurant has gone through during the pandemic. Share videos of who you are, who your staff is, and humanize your restaurant’s brand to build a genuine connection with your audience. 


Once you’ve shared updates on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, you can then use social media to offer discounts on delivery options, encourage take-out orders, and support your community and customers by featuring them on your page and letting everyone know you care. 
Especially since so many are stuck indoors, social media is your one tool to instantly connect with them and share your story—use it to bring awareness to your efforts and offer your services. 

Make Changes to Your Restaurant’s Health Standards

Another important step to developing effective marketing strategies for your restaurant during COVID-29 is to make changes to your overall health standards. 
The new normal for society (for the time being) is to wear masks and face coverings in public places. Hand sanitizing stations should be posted at multiple locations in public areas for people to use. Social distancing requirements ask for people to stand 6-feet apart to curb the spread of disease. Altogether, these are measures that you also need to implement in your restaurant for customers to know and follow. 


So by using social media and working with your staff, make sure that you come up with a COVID-19 strategy at your restaurant that makes people feel safe. Your new health measures should include…
  • Instructing your restaurant staff to wear masks and gloves at all times
  • Using disposable menus for in-house guests
  • Wiping down surfaces and seating in between guests
  • Still maintaining curbside and to-go orders for customers
  • Offering delivery options for customers
  • Upgrading your POS to use touchless payment and transactions
  • Upgrading to ordering food through mobile apps or your website to eliminate the use of menus altogether
Adapting to the new normal is what leads to effective marketing strategies for restaurants in the midst of COVID-19. And once you have a firm plan at the helm of your relaunch, you can sweeten the deal with special offers to reel customers in. 

Offering Special Deals and Winning Customers Back 

Finally, you can use all of these efforts combined to offer special deals to customers in order to win them back. 


For instance, on social media, you can post a deal for a family bundle of food at a discounted rate. You can offer free delivery on orders over a certain amount. If a family has kids, anyone under the age of 12 gets an entree for free. If someone orders through your mobile app with a certain discount code, they get 50% off their meal. You can try anything you want to build a marketing strategy that works best, just as long as you provide value to your customers that they won’t find anywhere else. 
Pro tip: use your current customer email list and phone numbers to create email and SMS marketing campaigns to entice customers to order food—BuzzyBooth can help!

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